


Call of the Wild Part Two Commentary Track Transcription

by orphan_account



Category: due South
Genre: DVD commentary transcript, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 16:20:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1517114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a transcription of the commentary track for "Call of the Wild" part two, which was recorded by Paul Gross and, as such, was written/improvised by him. Not me. I did not write this, I just transcribed it to help contribute to the "due South" 20th anniversary hijinx.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call of the Wild Part Two Commentary Track Transcription

**Author's Note:**

> In the block starting around 18:32, Paul Gross describes their locations as being "in and around the Kiska or Kananaskis." In context, it's clear from how he's speaking that he's correcting himself there; Kiska is a completely different place from Kananaskis.

00:04-01:09

 

This is part two of “Call of the Wild,” and I’m Paul Gross. I

play Constable Benton Fraser and I was the executive producer

of, of this episode that you’re watching. When we decided that we

would shoot out west, it was quite an undertaking, actually, because

we had to pick up the entire crew from here and get, get it all out there.

We moved an awful lot of stuff with us, and that meant driving all

of the trucks, so the logistics of trying to figure out when and how

to do this inside a production schedule that has a delivery deadline

was very complicated. And in a funny way, I mean, you know,

making a show like this, like _due South_ , was…it’s a bit like running

a mini-army. The, the logistics are almost as important, or become

equally important to what it is you want to shoot, because if you

make mistakes then the whole operation starts to grind to a halt.

 

01:10-01:39

 

Frank Siracusa was my, my producer; co-executive was Bob

Carney, who headed up the writing department, which is

actually the, the, the most critical piece of a, a television series,

I think obviously. And then comes physical production and

Frank Siracusa was responsible for that and he was absoluately

fantastic. Frank could, had the ability to look down, you know,

a month in advance. And he was the guy who made the whole

trip out west possible.

 

01:40-02:15

 

Here’s an interesting problem that we, we realized in writing it

that we had written ourselves into a corner. It’s a bit like

painting yourself into a corner. Mercifully, Benton Fraser

has…well, he could, we could always just expose another

skill that perhaps people didn’t know about, and that came

in handy in, in the course of this scene. Because there we

were, stuck in an airplane: how are we to get out of it? How

do we even know where we’re going?

 

02:16-03:05

[No commentary during opening credits.]

 

03:06-03:15

[No commentary.]

 

03:16-03:29

And in this half of the sh— of the finale, we really

had it separated. We had a plot running in Chicago,

and a plot running in northern Canada, which we

were actually shooting in, in the Rockies.

 

03:30-04:43

You know, one of the things about…when we were

writing the show we had someone in it who was engaged

in it who was, who would watch for inconsistencies. That

if we had established something in a previous episode and then

we contravened that or contradicted it in an episode that we

were working on, that person would say, “Well, you can’t do

that” because Fraser already said, for instance, that he doesn’t

know how to speak Swahili and you can’t have him suddenly

speaking it. And it’s odd but those things become really important

because a lot of the fans who were really dedicated to it would,

would have their eyes out for when we would make errors and we

would get volumes of letters saying, you know, “you can’t do this”

or “this happened that shouldn’t have.” You actually had to be very

careful. And it was, I think it’s a good thing, too, that there is

some rigour applied to it. So here’s one of the skill-sets that

you wouldn’t imagine that Fraser had but it became desperate

because we were stuck in this airplane and how no idea where

we were going, but thank God I can actually decipher binary traffic.

 

04:44-05:02

[No commentary.]

 

05:03-05:36

And that’s one of the more serious moments, clearly, and

still brings a tear to my eye. [05:12; laughs] “We’re in

luck.” You know, on almost anything else, that would be

considered cheesy, but [laughs] I always thought we could

get away with things like that. Not too many of them, ‘cause

then it sort of veers into _I Dream of Jeannie_ -land, but…. Then

the other problem coming up was how we were going to get

out of the airplane.

 

05:37-06:00

[No commentary.]

 

06:00-06:36

Now…this is what you’d call product placement. And the

reason we had that is that we had to, obviously, get an

entire crew out there and the only way we could do it is if

we got Air Canada to pay for some of…or to give us a cut-

rate on the tickets. And they said, “But we want some sort

of plug about our airline.” So I thought, “Well, sure, we’ll

put…give us some of your footage, we’ll stick your plane

in it.” And it seemed sort of amusing to us all. In hindsight,

I don’t know if that that kind of crass commercialism is

correct, but really, who cares?

 

06:37-06:47

[No commentary.]

 

06:48-07:27

You know, this is Tony, a Toronto actor, incredibly talented

guy. It was one of the great things about the show is, over

the years of doing it, I’d say it seemed as though just about

every actor in the country at one time or another, at least the

ones who were located kind of around Toronto came through

the show. That was…a wonderful thing every week to, to get

the new guest star arrive and get to meet them and start to

work out anything that may be troubling them about the

material that they had to do and…. But it was always a

lot of fun. And so each show would have a completely

different flavour, in a way, because of the new people that

came in.

 

07:28-07:35

[No commentary.]

 

07:36-07:58

This would be one of Callum’s just sort of on-the-spot

sort of inventions. “Dolphin Boy”…nobody ever really

understood what that meant. But he did. And that’s,

and that’s really what’s important in the long run is…

as long as the _actor_ understands what he’s doing, it is

hoped that the audience will as well.

 

07:59-08:20

[No commentary.]

 

08:21-08:57

We had introduced, I think it was at the end of the

second season, a group of kind of…I don’t know what

you’d…sort of hard-core, off-the-grid, right-wing

extremists, and they were known as the Fathers of

Confederation. And we decided that we would bring

them back here. Mostly because the, the leader of it….

They were called the Bolt brothers and the leader was

Kenny Welsh and Ken is just a great guy, he’s an

awful lot of fun. And so it always seemed like a good

idea to have him return. And that, this was a very

convenient show to have him return in.

 

08:58-09:15

[No commentary.]

 

09:16-10:00

Now, there’s a phenomenon in…well, I imagine it’s

in any mountainous region, but it’s the one I know from

the Rocky Mountains. It’s called “bottomless snow,”

which essentially means that so much snow has fallen in

a particular area that you actually can’t get to the bottom.

When we were beginning the _due South_ , with the pilot,

we shot up in the White Pass between the Yukon and the

Northwest Territories and we were in bottomless snow.

[9:47] This is a bit of a…untrue. It wouldn’t be like

falling into a duvet, but this is _due South_. So we had,

luckily, in the plane, a pack of supplies that we could

do things with and bottomless snow.

 

10:01-10:09

[No commentary.]

 

10:10-10:37

Now that’s a real shot. We actually really did jump

out of a plane and land in bottomless snow. And if

ya believe that…. No, those are one of those tricky

shots where none of that is actually real. There’s just

a shot of the mountains, there’s a digitally placed figures

falling and there’s an airplane that was shot in a fly-by

that we put in and…. But it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

 

10:38-10:48

[No commentary.]

 

10:49-10:59

And this was also very much part of the kind of schtick

that we used. Fraser’s uniform is pristine and fine, and

Ray, of course, covered in snow.

 

11:00-11:05

[No commentary.]

 

11:06

And there we are.

 

11:07-11:30

[No commentary.]

 

11:31-11:46

As it turns out, he isn’t just “have a couple of guns,” he’s

actually after a nuclear submarine. Now, again, a nuclear

submarine isn’t something that you would put into, you

know, _NYPD Blue_ , but, but we could actually get away

with it here.

 

11:47-11:52

[No commentary.]

 

11:53-12:16

And I don’t think the show ever had a particular

political agenda other than, you know…. As I’ve

said, underlying it was a basic kind of humanism, I

suppose, as represented by Fraser, Fraser’s general

niceness as a kind of mediating or mitigating influence on

the more corrosive aspects of the society he finds himself in.

 

12:17-12:22

[No commentary.]

 

12:23-12:50

Shooting in the Rocky Mountains is, partly, it’s just brutal.

Because moving anywhere is tough, getting yourself out into

those places is hard, you don’t have an awful lot of daylight

to shoot in, you get really…I think it’s sort of about seven or

eight hours when we were there. It is completely offset by the

fact that you’re in this absolutely stunning, exquisite terrain.

 

12:51-13:01

[No commentary.]

 

13:02-13:38

Now we would occasionally get criticism that the show

featured these sort of…stereotypes of Canada that were

misleading. That we were not, in fact, a northern, deep-

snow nation, but most of us lived in cities. And while

that’s, of course, true, the show wasn’t really concerned

with that. We used this, the stereotypical iconography,

really, as our subversive weaponry to overtake the world,

led by Leslie Nielsen, who can do a burning oven mitt

better than anyone, really.

 

13:39-13:43

[No commentary.]

 

13:44-14:29

Yeah, and it was a great joy for everyone to work with

Leslie, not only because he’s such a terrific guy, but he’s

also extraordinarily good at this stuff. And, and he, in a

sense, almost kind of invented the straight play. I learned,

to some extent, learnt from him how to play Fraser, that the,

you know, the way the straighter it was, the funnier it could

actually become and almost any time that I’d sort of push

something and think, “Oh, this could be funnier if I just added

a bit more of a wink in this line,” it, it would fail. And I would

kind of look back to Leslie or be reminded of how he really

got the stuff to work. Is completely believing in what you’re

doing. And if what you’re doing is silly, then it will inevitably

be funny.

 

14:30-14:58

[No commentary.]

 

14:59-15:24

I think, I’m not sure if this is the first time, but you start to hear

the strains of Stan Rogers’ tune _Northwest Passage_ which I think,

in a kind of a way, became our, the theme for this show and, I

suppose to a certain extent, kind of the theme for the whole series

in a way. It has a melancholy wistfulness in it, a sense of reaching

for something.

 

15:25-15:32

[No commentary.]

 

15:33-15:44

That was a real wolf. And that is a real fire. And that’s…

all part of the magic.

 

15:45-15:59

[No commentary.]

 

16:00-17:11

We had to figure out a way to, to, to start to bring things

to their end. It was a very difficult decision to do that,

actually. When we started into this twenty-six shows, we

didn’t really know that we were necessarily gonna finish

it. But what had happened is that we got to a certain point

where, where I started to think, “Well, we’ve done what we

can do. We’ve written most of the stories that we seem to

want to do.” And we really only had, sitting on a table, two

or three plotlines that we hadn’t done or two or three areas

of things we hadn’t investigated. And I’ve always felt that

shows can go on just far too long…they lose their drive, or

what it is that makes them special or important. So somewhere

through the first thirteen, fourteen, fifteen shows when I was

an executive, I think I made the decision, okay this will probably

be the end, then. And then that had a lot to do with framing, how

we would approach this one.

 

17:12-17:16

[No commentary.]

 

17:17-17:39

This entire sequence of making this rock climbing was

very complicated. We built part of a rock and drew it

up to the top of Fortress Mountain, some of it is a plate

shot – that, for instance [17:25] is completely real. [Laughs.]

No. That’s sort of a composite of things. They’re, they’re

tricky to do but ideally, of course, you don’t see any of that.

You just see the, the effect of it.

 

17:40-17:43

[No commentary.]

 

17:44-18:10

Coming up is a silly little bit that…actually happened. Tom

Melissis…and unfortunately the camera wasn’t designed to

go that far, but what you don’t see in that previous shot [17:55]

is that Tom actually drove the car into the wall of the airplane

hangar. He, for some reason or another, didn’t get onto the

brakes early enough. And it’s one of those things you think,

“Woo, it would be nice to just go back and actually shoot the

impact,” but we had to move on.

 

18:11-18:31

[No commentary.]

 

 

 

18:32-19:21

When we first went up to the top of Fortress Mountain,

we were scouting for locations. We used a lot of stuff in

and around the Kiska, or Kananaskis. You know, there’s,

there’s a very humbling thing that happens when you’re

around mountain climbers. I recall standing there with Frank

Siracusa, Steve DiMarco and a few other people, and we

looked maybe, I dunno, couldn’t have been more than about

five hundred yards at a certain rock outcrop and thought,

“Well, let’s just walk over there and see what things look

like from there.” And so the mountain, mountaineers who

were with us, kind of guiding us, they went charging off

to this rock outcrop. We _barely_ made it up there, gasping

and heaving and they weren’t even panting and I thought,

“Well, I may be fit in the show but I’m not in real life.”

 

19:22-19:28

[No commentary.]

 

19:29-20:24

I think we all had…probably one of the highlights of our

working careers doing this particular episode out in, out in

the Rockies. I know for a fact that Dean McDermott did.

He plays Turnbull. Turnbull was a, a…. I don’t know if

Turnbull was ever really planned. I’m sure he wasn’t quite

exactly planned to come to have such a significant role in

the show as, as…by Paul Haggis as he did eventually come

to occupy. Dean is a, is a wonderful guy. He’s big, he can

play straight and sort of mean and everything with great

facility, but he’s got this extraordinary ability at goofy comedy.

He actually tried to propose to me once that we do an entire

show built around Turnbull’s love for cheese. Mercifully,

I didn’t follow up on that.

 

20:25-20:34

[No commentary.]

 

20:35-20:48

Now we didn’t exactly get hypothermia shooting up there,

although it was…. It was cold and it was, it was a lot of hard

work. As I’ve said before, you know, it’s compensated by

being in such an extraordinary place.

 

20:49-21:01

[No commentary.]

 

21:02-20:18

And in a strange way it was always, _due South_ was always a

mixture of a kind of…lofty and low. Somewhat sacred and

definitely profane. And then it would…we would have the

opportunity to put in shots like this [20:18].

 

29:19-29:27

[No commentary.]

 

29:28-22:34

I have no idea whose idea it was to put in that commentary about

a film. But we always had the sense that, with _due South_ , that when

we have something as evidently huge as a shot like that and 

emotionally large, that we’d try to undercut it. And a lot of the source

of the humour was in coming underneath something. So that when it

was working, you’d get both. You’d get that sort of…that sense of

lift and elation, but also be aware that we’re not taking ourselves too seriously.

The wind that you see in here [22:07] is actually, it was actually

worse when we were shooting it than it appears on camera. But

if you get a…you can kind of see that the snow is horizontal. All

of this stuff had to be looped later because the conditions were

just…the wind was just astronomically brutal. And at one point

Gordon Pinsent was up at the top of the hill and he sat back into

the wind and it was supporting him.

 

22:35-22:40

[No commentary.]

 

22:41-24:05

Now, the crevasse was actually built and we shot it in Toronto.

The reason for this is that, although there’s no lack of crevasses

in the glacial fields of Alberta, they’re really not all that safe to

shoot on. This was probably one of the more formidable challenges,

was to actually make all of this work. I have to just put in a thing

here [23:08]: nobody should ever attempt this with a handgun.

 

Now, that cloth blowing out there, that gives you an idea of what

that wind was like. ‘Cause that actually is not a digital effect

or anything; that cloth just actually did that. When we were trying

to move the crew up to the top of the mountain, we were in a white-out

and everything was going up by sled. We lost people off the track where

snowmobiles would kind of disappear because they couldn’t see where

they were going. One of our guys got hit by the, a rotating chair,

chairlift of the ski hill; was knocked senseless and had to be

medevaced out. It was quite…we actually was quite tough. We lost

a lot…there were a lot of injuries doing this. But I don’t think anyone

regretted coming because, you know, in the day off we could go

skiing at Lake Louise and there really is nothing better in the world.

 

24:05-24:16

[No commentary.]

 

24:17-24:43

And somehow over the course of the show it became, it became

kind of a fun thing for everybody, for us to do, the writing staff,

to start to introduce little pieces of Canadian history. Some of

them were news to us and hopefully they were fun to others. But

the Franklin Expedition remains one of the great enigmatic, odd

events in Canadian history, I think, and….

 

24:44-24:48

[No commentary.]

 

24:49-25:10

…the kind of open-ended quest that that…that his story seems

to represent was something that, for me, in any event, seemed to

embody something of the spirit of the show: its inherent optimism

and…essential hopefulness for the better part of, of ourselves.

 

25:11-25:26

[No commentary.]

 

25:27-26:15

And this is the second full Stan Rogers song that we actually

used in the show. We used it in the boat show, or “The Mountie

on the _Bounty_ ,” we used “Barrett’s Privateers” and then this one

used “Northwest Passage.” I’m not sure that I do such an

honourable job of it, but it sure is nice to sing.

 

Now this character [25:51] is one of those convenient things that

Fraser’s unchronicled history affords you. Again, this was one

of those corners we had really worked ourselves into that we

thought, “Well, how do we get out of here?” Well, perhaps

one of Fraser’s old friends from childhood will be passing by

and can offer him a hand. So that’s where Delbert [sic] came from.

 

26:16-26:47

[No commentary.]

 

26:48-28:06

Callum falling down in that scene, that actually…he just fell down.

That was the wind. Yeah, we thought it would be a good idea to

put in the, the soccer team cannibal lost in the Andes Mountains

story here, appropriate spot for it. In fact, the, the couple of days

we spent at the top of this particular mountain was some of the

hardest shooting that I’ve ever been engaged in. Of course you

can’t see the crew, but it’s, it’s quite extraordinary ‘cause they

started to curl up roughly like dogsled dogs would. You can see

them all huddled behind pieces of outcropping or, or really just

kind of curled up in the snow. We all got together and felt like we

had to give a particular present of appreciation to our focus puller,

who, of all of us on that crew was the only guy who really had to

take his gloves off all the time in order to do his work around the

camera. And I’m not sure how his hands didn’t just fall off.

Maybe they have subsequently, but somehow he managed to get

through it. It was very hard shooting, but the conditions were so

extreme that just made us kind of giddy. When it’s that bad, you

start to laugh.

 

28:07-28:51

And then we knew that we wanted to have a really terrific toboggan

ride, in keeping with things roughly Canadian. And in order to put

this together, we did lots of crazy toboggan riding, we had one of the

guys who shot skiing sequences for James Bond movies came

in and just…well, that’s him, doing that right there [28:29],

he was flying down the mountain with a camera in his hand.

And then, of course, we had to have a big jump [28:43]. There

were a lot of little, minor accidents making this. And, finally,

we’re home [28:51].

 

28:52-29:06

[No commentary.]

 

29:07-29:33

This is when we actually noticed the cold, shooting this. The

temperature drops considerably at nightfall. That fire, as

cheerful as it looks, really doesn’t give off an awful lot of

heat. It was a pretty chilly night, but it was so clear. I’ll

remember to this day the clarity of the stars and the caps of

the mountains…stunningly beautiful.

 

29:34-29:40

[No commentary.]

 

29:41-32:22

As much as we would make use of, or make fun of, Canadian

iconography, I actually think that the…part of it was…it is in

large part responsible for the interest the show seemed to have

generated around the world. Which to this day, to some extent,

I still don’t really understand. Somebody told me the other day

that we were number one in Iran and I think, “Well…how? What

in…what could they possibly get out of this in Iran?” I’ve had

fan mail from around the world. I think it’s played in virtually

every territory and been very successful everywhere it’s gone.

I think in part it’s the, the heart of the show is very gen…it’s

genuine and generous. I think partly it’s…the show came out

at a time when so much of what was on television was

particularly cynical and it, it really isn’t. Never was. And I think

that probably was partly appealing. And I think, you know,

part of it was the uniform, but most of it, probably, was

Diefenbaker. There were, to be honest, a few different

Diefenbakers. It took awhile to sort of settle in with a

particularly reliable one. And the Diefenbaker we have in

this episode is Draco. Very bright dog, a bit of a ham,

something of a star, he had a Macauley Caulkin

side to him, little hard to control, but when the chips were

down he could really deliver. There’s a very, very

talented performer who had a trailer that was larger than

any of the actors’. I guess it all seemed, while we were

making the show, to be kind of, sort of unreal that it was

that popular in, with so many people all over the place.

Last summer I was in Italy for a couple of months and

we were staying near Florence and I, we, we went into

the town and I was looking at the David, Michelangelo’s

David, and being so completely stunned by it, obviously,

it is one of the great wonders of the world, but leaving

the Academia, I was stopped by a guy who said, “You

know, I like you, I saw you on television this morning,

but I like the David better.” [Laughs.] That’s…good

thing! It made its way over to Italy, so….

 

32:23-33:14

This was one of my favorite little stretches, was to…I

started in the theatre and still return to it and I think if

there’s any great god in my artistic life it would be

Shakespeare and we took this speech from _Henry V_ and

just made it sort of…not so good. It’s the St. Crispin’s

Day speech and Leslie is just…magnificent at it. If you

actually can get a copy of…. Get a copy of Ken Branagh’s

version of the movie and see that speech and then run this

clip and you’ll laugh your head off. It’s really…. I think

it’s standalone funny, but if you have a bit of the Shakespeare

alongside it, it’s…it’s even funnier. And of course with Turnbull

weeping it just caps it.

 

33:11-33:15

[No commentary.]

 

33:16-34:23

We’re coming up, roughly, to the section that’s, that was one

of our largest logistical problems, and this has to do with a

nuclear submarine and a frozen lake. For quite some time

leading up to us getting out there, getting ready to shoot,

we needed to have a frozen lake because the whole effect

was to have this submarine come up…basically, it’s

supposed to be coming up in a river or in a fjord that

opens out to the sea, we were just using the lake for the

purposes of shooting. And for some unknown reason,

Alberta elected to be extraordinarily warm that winter

and we kept sort of checking in daily to see whether the

ice was beginning to form on the lake that we had chosen,

seeing whether the forecast seemed to indicate that it was

gonna…that it was going to be frozen and for the longest

time it didn’t look as though it was going to be. And then

we started having to search further and further north and

thinking that well, perhaps we’re just going to have pick

everything up and move to the Yukon or maybe up in the

Northwest Territories…. But as it was, as you can see,

the lake finally did freeze and underneath it, we hid a

submarine. Now that’s not something you’d ordinarily do on

a television show, but this was a finale.

 

 

34:24-34:37

[No commentary.]

 

34:37-34:43

Now, Diefenbaker is going to seek help, and the help he gets

will come in the form of some spectacular guys who appear

from the air.

 

34:44-33:49

[No commentary.]

 

34:50-35:16

For those of you who followed the show, you’ll recall that

these two guys…not only did they know each other from

way back, but they teamed up in the, in the train show. Now

I can’t remember what that one was called, but we just called

it “The Train Show.” ‘Cause we shot it on a train, and we’d

walk back and forth and see the two of them in their red

uniforms, sitting side-by-side in a chair and just cackling and

howling and making crazy jokes. They really were great men.

 

35:17-35:23

[No commentary.]

 

35:24-35:43

No, it’s not normal because it is, in fact, a nuclear submarine.

Which we rented from Russia. [Three second pause.] Well,

no, we actually built it. Callum wrecked his knee on this shot [35:39],

which he blames me for to this day, but I didn’t think it was my

fault. It’s just that he’s clumsy.

 

35:44-35:58

[No commentary.]

 

35:59-36:19

It’s only now, in hindsight when I look at this and think, “That is

absolutely, utterly outrageous.” And, and, and wonder how it is

that we all felt so emboldened that we could just throw in a

Delta-class nuclear Russian submarine.

 

36:20-36:25

[No commentary.]

 

36:26-36:47

This is one of those utterly chaotic days of shooting, when we

had cameras going, bullets flying…it just [?] seemed completely

out of control, there were different units and different crews.

And when I’m watching something like this, that’s pretty much

all I can kind of feel, is I get a sense of returning to the, the utter

chaos of it all.

 

36:48-36:54

[No commentary.]

 

36:55-37:22

And the reinforcements…well, you’ll see how they were going

to come, but it looked for a second as if we might not actually be

able to get them because the conditions, the weather conditions,

weren’t favorable to it and we started thinking of alternate ways

and was…we were on the verge of ordering up about two hundred

horses and riders. But as it is, the clouds parted just long enough

so that we could get the reinforcements…. [37:18] And there

they are. That’s Canada’s parachute team.

 

37:23-37:33

[No commentary.]

 

37:34-38:23

And I think I can speak for everyone who was on the ice at the time

when these guys jumped and chutes all opened that it was one of the

most…bizarrely patriotic moments I’ve ever felt. Just about everybody

around us had burst into tears to see the whole sky full of Canadian

flags and Mounties. It’s funny when it gets cut together, of course, it’s

just a little moment in the course of the show, but it was quite an event

for all of us. It was also, kind of, one of the, two of the jumpers got

tied up together, so for a few seconds it looked as if it was potentially

gonna be awful. But in the end it turned out well and…and I think

we’ll all, all of us that were there and present at the time, really,

that’s emblazoned in our memories.

 

38:24-38:33

[No commentary.]

 

38:34-39:02

Now, I can ride a horse, and I can sort of… _sort of_ rope. Not terribly well,

but…. I have to admit to having some assistance with this sequence in the

form of one of the Bews brothers. Well known to Alberta: Tom Bews, T.J.

Bews, Dusty Bews. And it’s actually Dusty who does the roping right

there [38:56]. He can rope…. Well, he can rope a dime off of your nose

if he got it in a mind to do so.

 

39:03-39:12

[No commentary.]

 

39:13-39:14

And the thrills just keep a’comin’!

 

39:15-39:26

[No commentary.]

 

39:27-40:25

One of the great things about working on that show is how much

we all learned. And I have to, again, throw a great, enormous

amount of gratitude and thanks to Paul Haggis. And Paul

trained through the Lear organization and worked on

 _thirtysomething_ and, and he brought to the show this unbelievable

rigour and the determination to do only that which is, is your very

best. And to never settle for anything. And so we kind of, all of us,

I think, were embued with that discipline and we pushed, pushed

all the time. If we were gonna do an action sequence, we were to

say to ourselves, “How can we make this more exciting? What is

the next thing that can happen?” And that’s how you end up in,

at the bottom of mineshafts. And hopefully all of that was brought

to bear as we tried to, to bring all the various elements of the show

together and kind of close them off.

 

40:26-40:31

[No commentary.]

 

40:32-41:14

And it was, it was very difficult to do that. Difficult for a couple

of reasons: hard, really, just to, to figure out how to do it. But it

was also really, it was very difficult to close the show down.

Although we didn’t actually finish shooting with this, we sort of

mark it as a kind of…time when it was coming to its end. And

I think since we knew that was where it was headed, it had,

of course, to do partly with Gordon and, and since it began in

the Yukon with his death, we had to bring it around again. And

say good-bye.

 

41:15-41:55

[No commentary.]

 

41:56-42:16

And when you work on something like, like a show like this,

with so many people who become so close and such good friends,

and you become extraordinarily good friends with the characters

that you play and that you interact with every week, it’s, it’s

a very hard thing to say good-bye to, it’s a difficult thing to

let go. I suppose in your mind, you always hope that at some

point you’re going to have experiences that rival it, or at least

equal it.

 

42:17-42:39

[No commentary.]

 

42:40-42:51

I’m not sure that that, in a series sense, is really possible. There are

so many things that made _due South_ so special to the people who

were involved in it. We may not see its like again.

 

42:52-43:13

[No commentary.]

 

43:14-44:09

I do believe that that joke is actually Tom Melissis’ joke.

I think he’s the one who came up with it. I accept no

responsibility for it. In fact, a lot of these little tie-offs

were the actors’ ideas. I recall going and saying, “Where

do you see your character headed?” And, I suppose really

it’s just a steal from the ending of _Animal House_ , where

you kind of get to…get a sense of the general trajectory

of the characters you’ve been following. And I think, also,

we were kind of trying to leave things relatively open so

that if we did get it into our heads to do perhaps a movie-

of-the-week or something that, that we could actually bring

it back. The one character we’ve lost, of course, is, is Thatcher.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was…well, we haven’t

heard from her since.

 

44:10-44:24

[No commentary.]

 

44:25-44:29

So, perhaps if we do come back, we’ll come back…

we’ll actually find Franklin.

 

44:30-45:00

 

45:01-45:58

It was a, a great period in my life, to be involved in

this show. I think it was…I think it was a special thing

for most of the people involved in it. And, from time to

time, we run into each other, we’ll be talking and almost

always, there’s, you know, those “remember whens” people

hearken back to various incidents. On other shows I’ve

worked on where crew members have worked on _due South_ ,

that’ll always come up. It’s impossible to know why shows

work. The, at the core of all these things, it seems to me,

it’s a great mystery. And, for whatever reason, the various

ingredients seemed to click with this one. And we’ll all

remember it with great fondness, I think, and miss it.

 

45:59-46:15

[No commentary.]

… _for the Beaufort Sea_

_And make a northwest passage to the sea…._

 


End file.
